The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Italians and the Invention of Race: The Poetics and Politics of Difference in the Struggle over Libya, 1890-1913

Abstract: This essay is part of a book in progress about Italy and Africa in the modern and modernist Italian literary imagination and cultural identity, from Gabriele d’Annunzio to Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (1947). It argues that racism, colonialism, and imperialism are not an incidental, minor (and thus, understandably largely forgotten) component of Italian identity and Italian history, but that in the final years of “Liberal Italy,” they became increasingly a defining trait of the imaginary Italian national identity. As in the Risorgimento, literature and the literary imagination played a crucial role in this unifying process. In a nation whose wealth and growth after unification were effectively based on the exploitation of voiceless women and peasants and where parliamentary politics was soon reduced to cynical maneuvers, bargains, and intrigues, intellectuals, writers, and idealists had sought in vain a principle around which a strong sense of national identity and community could, however belatedly, take form. An imaginary construction of racial difference and the fashioning of an imaginary “Italian” ethnic national identity, contributed more than any other element to unify Italians and give them the sense of being “one nation.” The word and concept razza in this period, are not used just as another way of saying patria, but rather to forge the sense of an imaginary yet essential identity. This imaginary sense of identity could entice and include even those who, like women, Catholics, Jews, peasants, and Southerners, were (or felt) excluded or alienated from the humanist discourse and the paternalistic yet secular rhetoric of Italian Risorgimental patriotism. This new imaginary identity was constructed and reinforced increasingly by applying the debasing colonial logic of otherness outside rather than inside the nation’s borders. The creation of an imaginary racially different and inferior “other” on the other side of the Mediterranean finally allowed for an Italian identity to come together as never before. The Libyan war was construed largely as a literary fantasy and a utopian wish-fulfillment. It represents the culmination of a racial process of self-definition by Italians, through which the profoundly disintegrating internal differences of race, gender, class, and religious belief that threatened the very notion of a united Italy were at once repressed, forgotten, and surpassed. Through the racialization of literary discourse, poets and prose writers took, for the first time in the history of united Italy, an active political role that in some ways was even more influential than that of professional politicians.

Playing with Languages: Children and Change in a Caribbean Village

Abstract: List of Maps, Figures, and Tables Acknowledgments Note on Transcription Conventions Introduction Chapter 1. Discourses of Differentiation, Unity, and Identity Chapter 2. Childhood in a Village "Behind God's Back" Chapter 3. Learning English: Language Ideologies and Practices in the Classroom and Home Chapter 4. Becoming "Good for Oneself": Patwa and Autonomy in Language Socialization Chapter 5. Negotiating Play: Children's Code-switching as Symbolic Resource Chapter 6. Acting Adult: Children's Language Use in Imaginary Play Conclusion Bibliography Index

The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture

Abstract: ""The Lives of Machines" is intelligent, closely argued, and persuasive, and puts forth a contention that will unsettle the current consensus about Victorian attitudes toward the machine."---Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt UniversityToday we commonly describe ourselves as machines that "let off steam" or feel "under pressure." "The Lives of Machines" investigates how Victorian technoculture came to shape this language of human emotion so pervasively and irrevocably and argues that nothing is more intensely human and affecting than the nonhuman. Tamara Ketabgian explores the emergence of a modern and more mechanical view of human nature in Victorian literature and culture.Treating British literature from the 1830s to the 1870s, this study examines forms of feeling and community that combine the vital and the mechanical, the human and the nonhuman, in surprisingly hybrid and productive alliances. Challenging accounts of industrial alienation that still persist, the author defines mechanical character and feeling not as erasures or negations of self, but as robust and nuanced entities in their own right. "The Lives of Machines" thus offers an alternate cultural history that traces sympathies between humans, animals, and machines in novels and nonfiction about factory work as well as in other unexpected literary sites and genres, whether domestic, scientific, musical, or philosophical. Ketabgian historicizes a model of affect and community that continues to inform recent theories of technology, psychology, and the posthuman."The Lives of Machines" will be of interest to students of British literature and history, history of science and of technology, novel studies, psychoanalysis, and postmodern cultural studies.Cover image: "Power Loom Factory of Thomas Robinson," from Andrew Ure, "The Philosophy of Manufactures" (London: Charles Knight, 1835), frontispiece.DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library

We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity

Abstract: Alternative Visionary Modernities. Anindita Banerjee. We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. 230 pp. ISBN: 9780819573346. $24.95 pbk.Reviewed by James R. SimmonsWe Modern People is a slim book, but it advances a grand thesis. The author, Anindita Banerjee, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University, argues that, in late-nineteenth-century Russia, science fiction quickly evolved from a marginal literature to a serious and important contributor to the debates over modernization. Moreover, Banerjee claims that, unlike in the West, where sf was largely an optimistic novelty fiction uncritically popularizing the wonders of science and the emerging technology, early-modern Russian sf was far more significant. This burgeoning body of fantastic literature (nauchnaia fantastika) published between 1894 and 1923 not only contributed to the formation of a unique and complex vision of modernity but was also a major participant in the formation of a distinctive Russian national consciousness.Banerjee questions the dominant scholarly perspectives of both Russian literature and modernity. She argues that the explosion of fantastic fictional texts along with comparable periodicals, manifestos, tracts, and visual culture produced alternate models to Western capitalist modernity long before the October Revolution imposed its distinctively Soviet model of techno-scientific utopia. Following Yevgeny Zamyatin, she asserts that, in the Russian context of "combined and uneven development," sf became more than an inconsequential byproduct of idle speculation or a popular source of entertainment. It performed a radical function as a primary participant in the formation of a national mind that was constructed out of imaginary literary representations of "alternative modernities" liberated from utilitarian Western paradigms of a technologically generated and materialistically directed progress (2-3).The book is organized around what the author calls a geographical genealogy. Rather than reconstructing a literary history of the genre with a linear chronology of authorship, We Modern People traces what she calls the arcs of continuity intended to demonstrate the continuity between this pre-revolutionary visionary literature and the Bolshevik imagination. She details four principal narratives in Russia's path to modernity that form the basis of the four sections of her book. In chapter one, "Conquering Space," she shows how imaginary locales of sf generated radically new ideologies and images of Russia. Chapter two, "Transcending Time," examines how science fictional accounts about autos, railroads, movies, and communications accelerated and compressed time, helping overcome the nation's "backwardness" {66-67). The third chapter, "Generating Power," traces how electricity evolved from a privileged novelty into a source of vitality for utopian speculation. Finally, the last chapter, "Creating the Human," reveals the ways sf became the medium for transcending the secular forces of mechanization and spiritual moral impulses that were reconfiguring humanity in the modern age.According to Banerjee, Russian sf writers used regional geography and technological marvels such as the trans-Siberian railway and electrification as a means to articulate (for urban intellectuals, the growing middle class, and even rural provincials) a uniquely Russian visionary model of development in imaginary spaces like Mars and beyond. The predominant motif, she claims, in numerous futuristic works by authors such as Tolstoy, Sluchevsky, Federov, Tsiolkovsky, and Bogdanov, is an organicist ideal in which humanity is both spiritually and biologically transformed. …